Although English is an alphabetic language, it is not a phonetically written language, such that written English is not directly correlated with spoken English. Unlike Spanish, for example, where the letter “o” always represents the sound /o/ (as in rosa, flor, and jardinero), the letter “o” in English can represent a variety of sounds (as illustrated in the words “to,” “of,” “so,” “off,” “woman,” and “women”). The “deep orthography” of English sets it apart from other alphabetic languages, most of which have more transparent orthographies. A challenge presented is that speakers of other languages find it difficult to abandon their implicit assumption that “sounding it out” is an effective strategy for pronouncing the English words they see in print. A second challenge is that literate/native English speakers are successful readers precisely because they suppress awareness of deep orthography such that they, too, are prone to believe they are “sounding out” words even when those words feature ambiguous orthography (such as “snow” vs. “plow” and “clean” vs. “bread”). It should be noted that from successful readers come teachers of language and reading who, ironically, are predisposed to underestimate the problem of deep orthography with respect to learning.
The conventional response to the problem of deep orthography in English is to represent pronunciation with phonetic symbols. Phonetic symbols are intended to establish a one-to-one correspondence between sound and symbol, thereby representing the way a word sounds regardless of its spelling. Examples of American Phonetic Alphabet symbols used to indicate sounds in a word include: two/tuw/; son /sΛn/; go/gow/; off/f/; woman/wmn/; and women/wímn/.
Phonetic symbols provide linguists and other educated people with a common language to examine the sounds of language. However, phonetic symbols are limited in their accessibility, and are basically inaccessible to those who struggle with the printed word. Moreover, phonetic symbols appear in many forms, with the International Phonetic Alphabet and American Phonetic Alphabet serving as bases for the broad range of modified phonetic alphabets found in various English dictionaries. Faced with these multiple modified phonetic alphabets, struggling learners quickly learn to avoid dictionaries as a resource for determining the pronunciation of a word. It is worth noting that most of the variation among phonetic alphabets is seen in the representation of vowel sounds.
When used by educated and literate learners, the use of phonetic transcription poses a more general problem: when presented with the individual sounds of a word, learners often conclude that each sound is equally important. In fact, each sound is not equally important in the context of a word or phrase: spoken English allows for a great deal of variation in individual sounds, but does require two elements in order to be comprehensible to another speaker of English: 1) that the speaker places stress (emphasis) on the appropriate syllable; and 2) that at the nucleus of that stressed syllable is an appropriate vowel sound. The word “canal,” for example, is virtually incomprehensible if the speaker places stress on the first syllable (/káenl/) instead of the second (/knáel/). In this respect, the use of phonetic symbols provides too much information and places an unrealistic burden on learners to filter through the information and prioritize their findings.
What is needed is a fun and accessible game to help English language learners bridge the gap between spoken and written English.